


child of the mist

by amako



Series: child of the mist (hidden in the leaves) [1]
Category: Naruto
Genre: Angst, Dissociation, Established Relationship, F/M, Foreplay, Gender Dysphoria, I can't believe I'm about to put this tag, I wrote something that looks like sex, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, In one sentence, Introspection, Love, M/M, Married Life, Mild Smut, Post-Fourth Shinobi War, Sakura was born in Kiri, Self-Acceptance, Self-Discovery, Trans Character, Trust, it will cover the Wave arc, it's a very brief mention, there will be a companion piece, this is wild, who did I become
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-22
Updated: 2019-02-22
Packaged: 2019-11-02 02:06:57
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,401
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17879063
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/amako/pseuds/amako
Summary: With silence for only company, Sakura stares, and the water slowly cools down.orDysphoria is a bitch, Shikamaru is so in love with his wife he's choking on it and Sakura needs to figure her shit out because she's going crazy.





	child of the mist

**Author's Note:**

> This is a sensitive topic for me, cause I'm trans  
> This is probably full of typos because I've wrote this in the last two days while bedridden because of my chronic pain. I'm on morphine so my brain-to-fingers coordination isn't the best, and it's very much possible that this work is complete crap. My apologies if it's the case, but you've been warned.  
> also i want a shikamaru in my life  
> the companion piece to this is already started, it's going to be the Wave arc and you'll understand why by reading this, so you can subscribe to the series if you're interested in reading it
> 
> japanese translations
> 
> rinkan: canopy  
> anata: a common name between spouses  
> tsuma: a pet name for a husband to his wife  
> akai ito: the red string of fate, the belief that every being is tied to its true love by a red string and that following it will lead you to who you're destined to be with. a lot of japanese works are based on this. a personal favourite of mine (and subject of my studies' final project) is Kitano Takeshi's 'Dolls', if you're interested.  
> eda: twig

Sakura is in the shower.

The little stool is steady, holding her weight easily, as she bends down under the stream of water. Her eyes stare without seeing at the big, round wooden tub. The whole room is full of steam, smelling of lavender, eucalyptus and camphor.

Abandoned by her side are the cloth she was using to wash herself, and the ghassoul mixed with water in the little wooden bowl she was supposed to put in her hair.

With silence for only company, Sakura stares, and the water slowly cools down.

 

Two hours later, she's down to the light yukata she sleeps in, worn by the years. The appetizing smell of gyudon has conquered the whole house, a traditional building like the one she used to live in before her family moved from rural Kiri a few years after the Kyūbi's attack. She remembers, when she joined the Academy a few months after her family arrived in Konoha, how much she hated their new small, two-story house, and missed their big, bamboo-sliding-door home.

Now, Sakura is living again in a huge house made of wood and bamboo, rice paper and woven bulrushes. The walls are covered with vertical paintings, gifts from Sai of her favourites landscapes from all around the world. He still hasn't come back from his travel, four years after the end of the war, and her walls are the countdowns to his returns. Once she has no more place to hang his paintings, he'll paint his last one and come back to Konoha.

The floors are comfortable, padded tatami that she insisted on, a nice pale yellow that she finds relaxing. She never wears her shoes inside, because that's the proper way in a house with tatami, and forgoes her slippers as she walks in soft tabi over the tatami out of the bathroom. Sakura finds the sound soothing, following the smell of gyudon to the kitchen.

Sitting cross-legged at the low table, Shikamaru is waiting for her. Dinner is served, steam rising above the scalding green tea she prefers in the evening. He's wearing the light kimono she gifted him on the one-year anniversary. It's made from silk and cotton grown in Kumo, a fabric he admired on the uniform of the Raikage's Guard. Sakura had it custom ordered for him, with the Nara crest embroidered on the back and on the breast.

 

“Hello,” Shikamaru says, almost whispers, voice soft. “You were in the bathroom a long time, my love.”

 

She nods, silent. Her legs fold under her in a graceful move, flowing like water as she slips into a similar position. Never one to push the issue when he doesn't find one, Shikamaru picks up his chopsticks and digs into his gyudon. Sakura picks at her rice, eating grain after grain, a blank look in her eyes.

She feels empty.

When the bean Shikamaru throws at her face bounces off her forehead, she jumps a little in surprise. She didn't even feel it coming. Now her husband is frowning, the issue becoming a problem, and the emptiness is turning into self-disgust.

Her chopsticks break under her unchecked strength. She gets to her feet in a flawlessly controlled move and leaves the table without having said a word.

 

 

Sakura is at the hospital.

Back from her lunchbreak, she's chatting with a co-worker before saying goodbye and entering her office. She hasn't taken the time to straighten it up recently, but it's not as bad as it could have gotten, given her past records on the matter.

She gets to her desk and sits down on the padded chair. Sakura grabs the seat to move herself closer and her chest knocks her inkwell over, the black liquid spilling over all her documents. She stares, nauseous, at the disaster in front of her.

With barely a thought for what she's doing, she shunshins out of the room and the whirl of leaves she trades for her presence only adds to the mess of ink staining her work papers.

 

 

Sakura is in bed.

Shikamaru is behind her, his hands on her stomach, his mouth on her neck. She can feel his erection growing in the small of her back. She shifts, presses herself against him more firmly. His fingers draw a map of patience on her navel, going lower, brushing against her hipbone.

She sighs, and the sound echoes against his breathy laughter, the one she feels vibrating against her throat. A thrill goes down her arms. She shivers. The air is cool, their body heat, shared but not enough, is leaving them tense, on the edge, ready to break. He moves his hips, rolls his pelvis against her back once, twice, a murmur of love shared on the skin of her collarbone.

His right hand finds her cheek, moulds itself against it like a glove and she breathes her starving love for him against his knuckles. His free hand abandons her hip and dips between her legs, playful fingers brushing— the wrinkled sheets on the futon, the air still crackling with the energy from her sunshin. Shikamaru's fingers close around a dead leaf. It cracks under the pressure and the sound seems to echo in the room like a sentence.

He rises slowly, his erection dead, and sits cross-legged on their bed. Sakura is curled up in the corner they put the laundry they need to carry to the washing room in the morning. Her eyes aren't meeting his. They're not meeting anything; they're frantic, and they're glazed over, and the last time he saw her like this she was so full of poison they had to bind her to a bed for six days and let her sweat the toxins while she screamed her heart out.

 

“Anata?”

 

She flinches.

Shikamaru closes his eyes. Inside of him, something is hurting.

 

“I'm going to get up and move two steps closer to you. Make any sound or movement and I'll stop and come back to bed.”

 

She's frozen, so he moves, and because she stays silent, he stops the promised two steps and asks for two more. Then once again, until he's sitting at her three, about an arm away from her. He's painfully aware of his naked skin, of her naked skin, of the drying sweat under his armpits and the drying everything on parts he doesn't want to think about right now.

He doesn't want to think about anything but the woman frozen in front of him, the woman he married in a forest embraced by the shadows of the Nara spirits, of the Great Deer and the Rinkan gods. In his heart, he's terrified.

There's something terribly wrong with Sakura, something that has been horribly hurting her for weeks as he stayed silent, observing. Oh, what a great observer he does. How he observes now, on the lukewarm tatami of his room, his naked ass sticking to it uncomfortably. How he observes his wife falling apart because he kept his mouth shut and never asked.

 

“Sakura, you have a mission tomorrow. Do you want to come back to bed? I don't mind sleeping at Ino's, it would really be no problem. You choose. I promise you either way is fine.”

 

Her head turns, like a puppet, a slow motion that sends chills down his arms. He has to force himself not to look away. Her eyes are dry. She doesn't look like Sakura. He doesn't know what she looks like. He doesn't know how it makes him feels.

 

“I'm not—” Her voice is rough. Shikamaru has to swallow down arousal and nausea at the same time. That's the voice he'd have gotten out of her if things had been alright. That's the voice she gets after he's made her come three times in a row and his cock is interested all over again.  _That_  is where the nausea comes from.

 

“I'm not kicking you out of your own bed.”

“You know it's not just _my_ bed.”

She snorts. “Whatever.” The woman who rises from the laundry corner isn't Sakura. But it's not the one who looked like he was about to gut her a minute ago either. He's counting it as a win, because at this point everything would.

 

Her hands find his ribs and her mouth his mouth and his cock a renewed motivation. His mind, not so much.

 

“Stop, stop.”

“Come on, you wanted to a minute ago. Relax. Let me give it to you.”

 

He grabs her by the shoulders, god damn happy for the war and the chakra she put into her stupid teammates. God damn happy for the debt Kurama felt he owed her in return for her saving his host's life, and the entire ocean of chakra he poured into the three new seals lining up on her forehead and the two more going down her nose, to store all the extra she couldn't contain in her own body when he made the transfer. Because that chakra went into her muscles, into her blood, her lungs, made her faster, stronger, gave her more stamina and a good twenty centimetres that put her just above Shikamaru now.

So he can look her right in the eyes when he sends her the most disappointed look of his life.

 

“Did you just try to shame me into sex, Sakura.”

 

He's not even making it sound like a question at this point. The coldness inside his chest is spreading too fast for control and that loss of control is bleeding over his tone, his words, and the look on his face. Her own blanches so fast he fears for a second she's about to faint. But she doesn't, and instead she wrenches herself out of his grip.

 

“Please accept my apologies, Shikamaru,” she says, in a voice so broken he barely recognizes it. If it weren't for how true his previous words were, he'd be beating himself up for it. Truthfully, he still is. He hates it. How did it come to this? How did they went from pre-sex cuddles to accusations and broken apologies?

 

His guilt tastes like shame, like regrets, like weeks too late to ask questions. Her head is hung low in the same shame he tastes between his teeth. Her broad frame, normally larger than life, larger than her own legend, is hunched over. He wants to wrap himself around her and protect her, like he vowed to do when he took his oath before the gods his clan believe in.

Instead he lets her go when she puts on uniform pants and a shirt she borrowed from Sasuke, her bra abandoned on the floor next to the words he keeps quiet, mouth shut as she quietly slides the door shut and leaves the room, then the house.

 

 

Sakura is on a mission.

It's not your regular B-rank, the ones she's usually sent on nowadays. There aren't that many A-ranks to do anymore, now that the Alliance is signed and actually working. The villages can't pay for missions against each others, so when their civilians have issues inter-villages, they have to bring it up to the new Alliance commission and it's sorted out in sessions. The shinobi force isn't ready to be ran out business yet, though.

A surprisingly organized mafia is spinning its web all over the Land of Wind and the Land of Earth. The Kazekage and the Tsuchikage asked by name for Team 7 to come and take care of it. Kakashi, who resigned the Hokage position at the end of the war to take care of a disabled Gai and semi-amnesic and traumatized Obito, made sure to leave his recommendation for a new Hokage.

With the obvious choice, Shikaku, dead, Kakashi had gone with his personal second favourite, Tsume. The Clan Head had taken the news with maturity and left the leadership of the Inuzuka to Hana.

Tsume has a very clear understanding of Team 7's skillset. She knows that it doesn't include master-level espionage and undercover work. Sai is an exception, so she has him come back from his travels to brief his teammates for a full week before sending all four of them deep into Iwa territory. It's not enough. Of course it's not. Shinobi live risky lives, it's a fact they're comfortable with, and those shinobi did face a god. There's a reason the two Kage asked for Team 7 and no other. If they ever get caught, they're the one team that will take the punches the best.

They do get punched. Because they get caught. It's not that they're bad, it's that they're not good enough. Naruto smiles just a little too wide, Sasuke sounds just a little too rich. Sai, actually, is perfect. His only fault is that he hangs out with the suspicious ones. Sakura is not good enough, because her part is the vaguely slutty, shuriken-trigger-happy Suna traitor who was raised on the country side and got bit by just enough scorpions that she knows her way around poisons.

So when a guy puts one hand on her thigh, one hand on her breast, and his mouth on her neck, she puts one hand through his sternum.

She doesn't even realize she's done it until she's three men into the fight and ripping the spine out of the back of the fourth one. The war left her with weird habits, ones that aren't for shinobi but for soldiers, attacks meant for an open battlefield that have no place in dark corners and assassination plots.

Her eyes only see blood and her whole body screams with the feeling of his hands on her skin, of the reminder of how people see her. How they'll always see. What they'll always see.

Sasuke is yelling her name, the closest to her so he's reaching like he wants to grab her. Obviously they know her, they noticed something was wrong. She clears her throat and slits the one of a man who had the bad luck of being in the same room as Team 7 that day.

 

“I'm good.” Even she can't trust her own words, and Sasuke's eyes tell enough, but he nods anyway and keeps fighting. It's the only thing that matters right now.

 

They do manage to take down the underground ring, and the Tsuchikage makes a joke about their lack of stealth. The four teammates go equally white knowing exactly what truly happened but for once, their reputation saves them. People know they're powerhouses, and they expect that kind of stuff from them.

They go home with pays too big, an even bigger one for the village (though this one is sorely needed) and they don't talk about it. And that's exactly why Team 7 fell apart the first time around.

 

 

Sakura is in the shower.

Cloth in hand, she sits on the little stool and she's vigorously scrubbing herself. In the bowl next to her, there's only some ghassoul left, because most of it is caking on her face or on her skin. After a mission, instead of using the mud, she washes her hair with a shampoo she makes herself.

In Kiri, before the Academy, everyone had to join a mandatory survival home. She has good memories of the place, even if she knows how it's seen in Konoha. It was their version of a daycare. She thinks it makes sense. It was their way to protect their children. You went for periods of three days at a time and you slept there.

They were equal parts women and men but you couldn't tell because they all wore the Kiri Hunter uniforms. Chest flat, hair hidden, mask with exaggerated lashes and cheeks pink. Both boy-ish and girl-ish, neither at the same time. The children were cared for by shapeless, genderless people who took the name of things instead of animals like ANBU do in Konoha.

In Sakura's survival home, because she came from a small village that had been integrated inside of Kiri after the crush when the Hidden Mist had expanded, there had only been two caretakers: Akaiito and Eda. With the wisdom of the years, she's now certain they must have been together. Akaiito chose the name of the red string of fate so dear to young girls and Sakura's pretty sure she went out to piss once and saw a dick in Akaiito's pants (which, ok, didn't mean Akaiito wasn't a woman, but she was going with the statistics at the time).

Eda was always playing with a twig, and that's usually how the Hunters picked names. Sakura had always been fascinated by the two caretakers and the ease they showed with their faceless identities. How little they cared about not fitting into the neat boxes her district always went on about when she played with her friends.

Give credit where it's due, but Kiri is probably the least sexist region of the continent. With its warmongering, shinobi-centered society, and the way they shape children into machines of death at such a young age, they can't afford to drive more than half of the population into the kitchen simply because they grow fat on their chest at age twelve.

In the survival homes, you learn to brew a tea that kills your hormones for a cycle and stops your next period. You learn which plants from each of the five regions can serve as an emergency next-day abortion. They teach boys to ask what day of the cycle it is and girls to know how to answer, so that you know how to not have a baby and how to have one. That's how Kiri keeps the highest, most stable fertility rate of the shinobi nations. They also, ironically, have the lowest infancy death rate out of the five villages, which drops morbidly at the Academy.

During the three days, Akaiito and Eda took the seven kids they had into their care out into the swamps around the village. They taught them how to hunt for food, how to build a source of warmth in the mist that isn't a fire. How to trap an animal, kill it and skin it. How to fish. How to build a board game, a deck of card, how to carve shōgi pieces out of wood.

They played hide and seek to teach the kids how to muffle their steps in the forest, they made plushes out of the furs of the animals they killed so the children wouldn't be so sad and could be proud of what they accomplished. They taught little Kira how to sew because her mom died of pneumonia last winter and her dad didn't know how and was always in missions, and he had no one to fix his uniforms now.

They taught them poultices and herbal teas and natural pain killers. What's a mercy kill, why you shouldn't kill when you don't need to, why you should always protect a child. Why the village always comes first.

At the end of the three days, the children go home to their parents, faces split into grins so wide the light shines through the immortal mist of Kiri, and the parents share fond looks because they remember their own stay into the survival homes, the best days of their life. And the next week, the kids go back. And they learn again. And when they go to the Academy, where they'll learn combat and assassination techniques and lying and spying and how to poison your enemy, they'll already be humans.

That's why Sakura knew, when they faced Zabuza, when she recognized Akaiito because he wore his ankle warmers the same way her old caretaker did, that they would survive. Haku was only more proof of that.

In one of her stays, Akaiito taught them how to make shampoo. She liked the smell of it so much that she's made it herself ever since. She hasn't bought a single bottle of the industrial thing in her entire life. She takes some of the fresh flowers she picked in the garden before coming up. She crushes them between her hands and scrubs the foam down onto her bowl. From the container she keeps in the shower, she takes some of the boiled root water and adds it to the foam. One drop of grapefruit essential oil, and some walnut oil from the trees of the Nara forest, that the civilians of the Nara clan make. Her clan now.

The mixture smells like childhood in Kiri. She pours it onto her wet hair and washes it. The water takes the drying ghassoul with it, and leaves her almost clean. Some bits of dried clay has clung to her breasts and the shower isn't enough to wash it away.

Sakura doesn't know if it's the memory from the survival home and how much she misses it, the renewed hurt when she thinks of the mission in Wave and Haku's death and how she secretly came back to the battlefield when her team was washing up, only to find out Akaiito was still breathing. How she cleaned his wounds and sutured them the way he taught her when she was little, bandaging the cuts one by one with her meagre equipment, until he was well enough to leave. The last look he sent her, somehow so familiar even though she had only seen Akaiito in a mask, and how he had put his hand on her shoulder. How much she misses him and Eda and how much she wants to see him again. Maybe it's just the way the day is going, but she can't stop the tears from falling. She cries softly, hiding her face in her hands, bowed in the shower on her little wooden stool.

She feels so stupid, and uncomfortable, and it's like the nausea hasn't left in weeks. On autopilot, she gets up, still crying, and turns off the shower. She leaves the bathroom dripping wet, naked, a voice in her mind sounding like Eda screaming loud enough that she puts on her slippers to not ruin the tatami.

The tears add to the water from the shower; she goes through the whole house, sliding the doors open and not closing them, feeling numb, like a ghost in her own home. She finds Shikamaru in his office, kneeling in front of his low desk while he works on some documents.

His head looks up sharply, and she gets to watch how his eyes widen in complete astonishment at the state she's in. But she doesn't laugh, because she's still crying, and she's still naked, and she's not dripping wet anymore but she's still not dried and now she's freezing cold.

Shikamaru jumps on his feet, his uniform pants snug around his thighs, his yukata shirt shifting the way she likes as he reaches for her.

 

“Tsuma, what is it?”

 

She gasps, the tears almost gone but replaced by dry sobs.

 

“Ah-anata, I need your help.”

“Yes, of course. Always. What do you need?”

 

She feels so stupid, and uncomfortable. Nauseous. Like a child, like a civilian, but certainly not like the woman who punched a god in the face. It makes her shiver badly, and not just from the cold.

 

“Help me wash.”

 

If he's surprised by the request, he doesn't show it. Instead, he nods and kisses her temple, wrapping an arm around her shoulders. Privately, they're both glad for what Kurama did and the height they share. There's something both comforting, attractive, and something that makes them strangely proud to be able to stand shoulder to shoulder with the other.

They'd never say it out loud, because they both think they're the lucky one, they're the one who doesn't deserve the chance they got, but being able to walk side by side with someone who's their equal is something they've been waiting for all their life.

Shikamaru almost leads her to the bathroom, and leaves his clothes at the door. Sakura waits for him, feeling childish for not daring to enter the room without him, but not willing to brave whatever this fear is either. They get inside and he sits her down on the stool, kneeling besides her with the cloth in hand.

 

“Do you want to tell me what's on your mind?”

 

Her eyes map his face, the little scar that crosses his upper lip, his curved eyebrows. Her hands rise, brushing softly the skin of his cheeks before carding her fingers through his hair, taking the string out to let the ponytail fall down. She opens her knees and he crawls until he's between her thighs, but still with some distance between the two of them. He hasn't tried anything since that disastrous evening almost six months ago and she hasn't said a word about it.

This time she grabs his hips and drags him forwards until she feels his soft sex against hers and his chest pressed against her whole body. Sakura wraps her arms around his back and her legs around his waist and he returns the embrace without hesitation.

Then she points at the clumps of ghassoul on her chest and Shikamaru nods, softly washing it off with the cloth. She shivers, the feeling unpleasant. His eyes are sharp on her face; he knows her well. When all the mud is gone and he's spent some time on her hair to make sure all of the shampoo is gone, he asks if she wants him to ready her a bath. She shakes her.

 

“I took you from your work long enough. Thanks for the help.” She turns around, showing her back easily in a move of trust that still sends chills of arousal down Shikamaru's body six years into their marriage and puts on a dark grey yukata.

“You don't have to brush this off. Please don't brush this off, Sakura. We're going to talk about this. It's gone on long enough, more than a year I think. You had to ask for help to take a _shower_ ,” he sighs, pressing the meat of his fingers into his eyes.

She grits her teeth. “Well, I won't ask again if it's such a hassle.”

“No, you don't get to do this. We're not fighting. I don't want to be the bigger person so I can blame you later and feel guilty. Talk to me. What's going on?”

 

Sakura slides the bathroom door close and walks through the next room and into their bedroom. She sits on the futon, the yukata sliding from one shoulder and pooling around her, long pink hair like a river streaming down her back and caressing her hips. The five seals on her forehead reflect a sliver of moonlight coming from the rice paper door of the inner garden.

She's the most beautiful woman he's ever seen.

He's also a genius, and he already has three theories as to what made her suffer through the past year like that. But he wants her to say it, because he could be wrong, and because it's also possible she hasn't admitted it to herself yet.

So he sits down, and he waits.

 

 

Sakura is in her bed.

Her husband is sitting down next to her, in a t-shirt and comfortable pants, naked feet twitching in a nervous tic. She has too many things to say and not enough words, not enough truth in the way she could say it compared to the myriad of feelings underneath her skin.

 

“When I was a kid, we used to go to the survival homes. The Hunters taught us stuff, useful stuff, that wasn't covered in the Academy. They wore masks, and they had binders and hoods and large yukata shirt. It was impossible to say what gender they were.”

 

Then she's silent again, but it feels like too much and not enough. Like she shouldn't have said that, and like she'll be offended if he doesn't understand now.

But this is Shikamaru, and she went into the forest with him, and she met his gods. She talked with them and she swore her life to the Great Deer when she swore it to her husband as well. There is nothing she wouldn't do, no one she wouldn't protect or kill, for that man.

 

“After the war, I was raped. We were—” she stops, because Shikamaru made a noise so violently heartbroken, so deeply, profoundly grieving she stupidly thinks he must have hurt himself somehow. She looks at him and he's crying, sobbing uncontrollably when he was the picture of calm a second ago. It's like something broke in him and she doesn't know what to do because she made her peace with it but he sounds like he's _dying_.

 

Sakura takes his hand between hers, speaking in a low voice between soft shushing noises.

 

“Shikamaru, it's ok, I'm alright. It's alright, my love. I'm fine. Look at me, I'm alright. It's over now. No one will hurt me. You're here. You're here, anata, it won't happen again. I'm alright.”

 

She keeps talking, hoping it will show him she moved on. She's not broken, he didn't marry a broken... well, she's not broken.

 

“After, I thought that was the reason I wasn't comfortable with my own body. It made sense. But then you came along and I said it was my first time, which, I mean, it was the first time I consented so I figured it counted—”

“It did,” Shikamaru says, wiping away his tears, his voice cold and furious in a way that reassures her because that Shikamaru she knows, even if she doesn't like him very much. “We were both virgins and it was the most awkward, ridiculously long first time ever and whoever did this to you isn't going to take that away from us.”

She smiles, all teeth to hide her fear of talking. “But it got worst and worst. And it's about a year ago when I used my chakra blade to remove my right breast. I, uh, did a bit of a stupid job because I was shaking so I didn't reattach the nerves all that great and I lost a bit of sensitivity. Then I chickened out on the left one so I reattached the right one and pretended nothing happened. Hum, anata, you're very pale.”

“Yes, I am, Sakura, because self-harm is pretty common for shinobi but breast amputation is a bit extreme, even for a Team 7 member.”

“No! No, that's not, I mean, I see where you're coming from but, oh _spirits_.”

 

She sighs, hiding her face in her hands. This is going all wrong. She knew she shouldn't have said anything, and now it's all going to hell because she opened her stupid mouth and asked him to wash her. How fucking childish.

 

“I was trying to get a flat chest because I want to be more like a man, Shikamaru.”

 

Sakura waits, tense like a chakra string. Shikamaru deflates in relief, his face regaining colours, and she blinks in surprise.

 

“Thank the forest, I'm sorry I freaked out. I was expecting something like this, but I was so worried it would be something worse.”

“... you were? Expecting this, that is?”

“You jump every time I touch your chest, you make a face when people tell you you're pretty or ask when we're having a kid, and last week you almost punched Ino because she offered you some leftover flowers from the shop to decorate our home.”

 

Sakura closes her eyes, ashamed. She draws her knees close to her chest, trying to shield herself. She doesn't even know against what, at this point. She's just so uncomfortable, all the time.

 

“You don't mind?”

“I married you, Sakura, not your birth certificate.” She shrugs, and points at her chest, hidden in the folds of the grey fabric. “I'm not straight and you know that.” She touches her hair. “Technically, it's made out of toe nails, and you're the one who told me that.”

“People will talk.”

“I married Titan Sakura, the Sannin who punched a God in the face, who invented a cure for the deadliest disease in the world in the first year of being Head of Konoha Central. I married the apprentice of two Hokage, currently in line to be one as well, whose opinion matters to every important person on the continent. People have been talking since I dared kiss you in the street and wasn't named Uchiha or Uzumaki.”

 

Sakura grins and jumps forward, tackling him into a hug that sends them sprawling on the bed. He crushes her against him, breathing into that scent of grapefruit and clean skin.

 

“I love you,” he kisses on her throat. “I'll never stop.”

 

 

Sakura is looking in the mirror.

She doesn't want to make a big deal out of it, because everyone knows who she is, so she can't go to the salon, but she doesn't want to make a mess and look ridiculous either. And if she calls her friends... no. Instead, she decides to do what any civilian would be able to do. She calls for a visit at home.

The hairdresser comes to her house in the Nara Compound, looking like a kid on his first day at the Academy. The man they hire for gardening and housekeeping when they're out (and because they have money and that's one more job for the civilians who struggle after the war) opens the front fence for him because of the protection seals and leads him through the traditional garden, with the bridges and the stream, the stone paths, the sakura trees and the weeping willows.

Once inside, Sakura welcomes him and it's like he's meeting the Hokage for how polite he his. She tries to tell him to stop but he doesn't listen, so she doesn't insist and gets him to relax instead. They have tea and mochi, she does her best to find the courage for what they're about to do, then he gets his tools out.

 

“So, what can I do for you today, Haruno-sensei?”

She has to clear her throat. “Cut everything, please.”

“I'm sorry?”

“Everything. Try to get the longest strands, so maybe you can donate it, though I don't know if anyone would be interested in pink hair,” she says with a scrunched up nose, “then cut it short. Something like Naruto. You see how Naruto's hair is?”

The hairdresser blinks his eyes a couple of times, looking like he's facing a Hunter nin “Yes, I see Uzumaki-san's hair. Are you sure? That's very short. You have beautiful hair, Haruno-sensei. It must have taken you years to grow it.”

“More than eight years, yes. And yes, I'm sure. Donate everything you can, then cut the rest to make it look like Naruto's hair.”

“Well, alright, if you're sure.”

 

To his credit, he does a marvellous job. He gets about eight ponytails of straight, soft hair from her head and assures her that they can make three semi-short bob wigs out of that, and that will make three women very happy. He tells her his salon doesn't normally say where the hair comes from, but pink hair is recognizable and those women suffered, so knowing the hair comes from her will make them very happy.

In Sakura's opinion, as long as her happiness means someone else's happiness, she isn't about to ask questions. In the end, she ends up with great hair that does look like Naruto's haircut, which she finds pretty funny, given that he cuts his own hair and she paid a lot of ryō to have hers professionally done.

 

 

Sakura is at the hospital.

She's finishing the skeleton of the new textbook on chest surgery she's going to send to the medical program overseen by her former apprentice. After her own successful surgery, she started the project, prompted by the surprising and frankly disgusting number of requests that were put on indefinite wait for that type of procedures by shinobi, of course refused at the time given that it didn't exist before she invented it. And she doesn't even want to think about the civilians, who probably where laughed out and not put on records at all.

Her own chest has healed perfectly without a scar. She poured every ounce of her knowledge, of her decade of study into creating this, and it shows. Her skin is smooth, her chest is flat, and she has working muscles that she can move and that she uses. At her request, Lee designed a custom workout regiment to compensate for the muscle loss and she passed it on to the hospital after giving herself a chest to make every Konoha 11 man jealous, to give to the future patients who will undergo the procedure after the doctors study her textbook.

On top of that, she put some of her own money into a research program for hormone therapy and bottom surgery. She's pretty sure, with the jutsu Naruto has used as a joke all this years, she can make something amazing. Everyone in her team reacted without much of fanfare to her surgery, and when she talked to Naruto about involving him, he was so excited she had to talk him into going back home because he was following her everywhere.

She's certain that by the end of the year, she'll have a foolproof medical procedure that would allow anyone to choose for themselves what their body should be. She's leaving the legal side of things into Tsume's very capable hands, and the Hokage hates her for that, but Sakura feels too good in her own skin to care.

 

“Do you still need to change the world, or can I take Haruno-sensei out?”

 

Sakura looks up and sends Shikamaru a smile.

 

“I think Haruno-sensei deserves a break.”

“Amazing. How about we treat ourselves to gyoza?”

“Lead the way,” she says, taking the hand he offers.

 

 

Sakura is laying on the grass of a small hill.

Shikamaru looks at the clouds, changing shapes slowly above them. They've been married seven years today. The war ended nine years ago. His life is slipping through his fingers but Sakura is a fixed point, stable and strong, always by his side. He's never felt so sure of anything.

Next to them is the blanket where they just ate a picnic, the smell of the jasmine tea they finished still strong in the air. He looks at Sakura, short, spiky hair tousled by the wind, flat chest underneath another shirt she stole from Sasuke. It feels like his own chest is about to burst from all the love it can barely contain.

 

“Anata?”

“Yes, Shikamaru?”

“Do you want me to use different pronouns for you?”

Sakura looks surprised by the questions, but not displeased. “I've been thinking about it for a while, actually. But you're not a genius for nothing, are you?” In a second, he has his arms full of legendary Titan, pink head of hair blocking the sun above him. He looks into eyes as green as the forest of his clan, as green as the uniform of his village.

“Yes, I think I would like you to use different pronouns for me.”

“Which ones? And do you want to change your name?”

“No. No, I'm Sakura. I left Kiri being Sakura, I killed Sasori being Sakura, Tsunade taught Sakura, I won against Kaguya being Sakura. I cured cancer being Sakura. Every single step of my life was fought using that stupid, girlish name. I'll bring it to the grave.”

 

Shikamaru laughs, kissing the tip of a nose taunting him. It makes Sakura giggle.

 

“The village is literally figuring this out with me and the few people who are being outspoken about it. There's no name for all of this, but I'm not sure I'm a man. I'm not sure I'm a woman either. Do you think, maybe, do you think you can still call me he? To see how it feels? Then we can figure it out?”

“Together,” Shikamaru nods. “I'll be the brain, and you'll be the brawn. Don't worry, I know how it goes.”

 

Sakura makes an offended noise and punches his shoulder, before rolling to the side. Shikamaru only needs one second to convince his brain to switch pronouns, and he's never thanked his genius more in his life. Now he can look at Sakura, and see what the other man wants him to see. Sakura is laughing and snorting at the same time, his eyes shining, and Shikamaru shouldn't be finding that as attractive as he is, but here they are.

He rolls over and crawls onto Sakura's legs, who opens them reflexively. “Hello, you.” Sakura smiles, raising an eyebrow, and he's so damn sexy Shikamaru is choking on it and he's suddenly very aware that if his IQ wasn't ridiculously high, he wouldn't remember the last time they had sex. Or, more accurately, his dick remembers.

Well, they would have needed to deal with this at one point or another. There's no time like the present, and he's not a coward. He swore that off in a hospital corridor, after both Temari and his dad kicked his metaphorical ass. Also, this is the man he married. There isn't a universe in which he isn't stupidly attracted to Sakura.

He leans forward, tucking his face into Sakura's neck until his cheek rests against his jaw. Shikamaru puts his lips barely a centimetre from Sakura's ear and breathes slowly, enjoying how Sakura shivers.

 

“Do you want to _fuck_ me?”

“Oh, forest gods,” Sakura pleads. His hand grabs Shikamaru's collar and he uses his super strength to take him off of him in a move that raises Shikamaru's arousal by seventy percent. “Take your clothes off or I'm going to rip them apart, I swear to the Great Deer,” Sakura promises as he throws Sasuke's shirt off, revealing his new flat chest, jōnin blues following until he's only in pants.

 

Shikamaru doesn't need to be told twice and follows Sakura's lead, and stops at the underwear as well. He looks down as his dick bulging underneath the fabric, then at Sakura's own underwear, with a frown.

 

“I think we need to talk.”

“You are seriously ruining the mood.”

“Absolutely. A panic attack or mistake for either of us is also going to ruin the mood.”

Sakura sighs. “Good point. Talk, genius.”

“I feel stupid but you look like you have a dick.”

 

Sakura shoves his hand down his pants and _spirits_ but Shikamaru sees white and he can feel his own cock leaking just from the sight.

 

“I asked Kakashi where he bought his book, worst conversation of my life, and I bought this at the same store,” he says, showing Shikamaru a prosthetic made of resin and and leather.

“Sakura,” he says, voice low and rough, “we don't have what we need here but you are fucking me with this one day.”

“Fuck, we haven't even touched each other and this is the most aroused I've ever been in my life.”

Shikamaru laughs. “Same, love. But, talking first. What am I not touching? What am I not saying?”

 

To his credit, Sakura does give it the thought it deserves while putting back the prosthetic in his pants. Shikamaru stares at his naked legs, brushing the grass, a few scars from the battle against Sasori a glaring white against Sakura's darker skin.

He wants to put his mouth everywhere and especially between those legs, but he's _not_ about to do the same mistake that led to all that time without sex. Not that sex is all that matters, but the look on Sakura's face that day is one of his worst memories.

 

“We've never been all that kinky, Shikamaru, that's not about to change. No dirty talk, especially things that'd make me sound too womanly, yeah? And you can touch everything, I changed what I had issues with. What about you?”

“This isn't about me.”

“Of course it is. I'm not having sex alone, anata.”

“I'm good with anything on principle. I'll tell you if anything comes up.”

“Great. Now, about fucking you?”

 

Shikamaru grins, and lets Sakura pins him down to the ground. With teeth on his throat, he looks at the clouds.

 

 

Sakura is in his arms. Shikamaru's husband is asleep, and he's not far either.

He's happy.

 

 


End file.
